


make me the rainstorm

by EmmaAndKeyboard



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Argent family dynamics, Gen, ep: s3ep23: insatiable, the afterlife
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 04:28:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1331917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmmaAndKeyboard/pseuds/EmmaAndKeyboard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you're a dead teenager, you learn things about clinging and breath and blame, whether you want to or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	make me the rainstorm

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a little beyond my emotional capacity after tonight's episode, but I knew I wasn't going to be able to sleep until I wrote this.

Death is not cold. It swells as a dull roar in the distance, then rushes over her in waves. Her body flushes over and something deep within her starts to tremble.

Scott is there, and even though Allison sees how scared he is, she is still comforted by his presence. His face is fades from view, but his body stays warm and pressed against hers until she drifts away.

  
* * *

  
She sometimes forgets what it was like before Beacon Hills. It's as if all the supernatural things that have happened to her in the past year sucked the essence out of the rest of her life.

  
One summer, they lived in New York. She didn’t like it. The subway cars were too loud and the people on the sidewalks jostled against her apologetically. Every day that entire summer, she clutched her parents' hands tight, and she was young enough that they gripped back just as tightly, afraid that they might turn around and find her swept into the crowd.

  
The apartment was home base. Her dad taught her what subway lines led to it. He told her to always talk to a policeman before she talked to a taxi driver, and her mother had dog tags printed with their phone number and address. Allison wore them on her wrist like a bracelet.

When she was in the apartment, she could relax. That was the summer of the crowds, but it was also the summer she won the junior archery championship in Nebraska, and in July her mother taught her how to make spaghetti.

  
She forgets sometimes that she had seventeen perfectly happy years before she knew something was wrong. She is not naïve. She is smart. She should have known something wrong ran deep within her family, but things were good. To her, they were normal. There was no reason to aim her bow off the target or tear her hand out of her parent’s palms.

It’s hard to remember how that was a good thing.

  
* * *

  
There’s no such thing as time in death. She learns that first. Nothing is concrete. Shapes and patterns blend and fade. It isn’t darkness, but it isn’t the sterile whiteness of her half-death, either. Thoughts and impulses fade in and out through her mind like smoke.

  
There is no floor, but she can fall, slowly, head pulled to her knees, hands over her ears, blocking out nothing in particular.

  
She doesn't cry, and she doesn't scream. She refuses to mourn herself.

  
* * *

  
She forgot her pen. She knows that all of this started years before any of them were born, but sometimes she feels like none of this would have ever happened if she had just brought her pen.

  
If she had just trusted Scott instead of Gerard, turned away from his lies instead of leaning into them.

  
If she hadn’t have gone to that party on the night her mother's eyes turned gold.

  
(She doesn’t wonder about what would have happened if her parents had told her earlier, just like she doesn’t wonder about ash on Kate's boots.)

  
(She can control herself in a way she can’t control corpses, and some part of her knows it's easiest to internalize the blame and deal with as much of it as she can.)

(She left the rest to the wind a long time ago.)

  
* * *

  
There are others. She realizes that they’ve been here the whole time, but she didn’t know how to sense them until now. They are a murmur or a whisper, something she can feel in her bones.

  
Some of them are harsh, and her fingers twitch for the bow she left behind. Some of them are soft, lingering for a bit, brushing against her when she is at her most miserable, and she thinks maybe they used to be mothers.

  
She learns how to brush back.

  
* * *

  
When she was with Isaac, things weren't as heated as they were with Scott. Scott was the sun. Isaac was a spark.

  
Isaac and Allison, they were both complicated, but on some level they get each other, the level where blame is a calculated weapon you wield to help get you through another day.

  
They were both a little screwed up in the head, sure, but they worked so well together. Allison thinks they could have been in it for the long haul. It wasn't her long term plan. She didn't have long term plans. Still, it was a possibility.

  
There were so many possibilities.

  
* * *

  
Blonde hair and apples and razor sharp words. That’s what Erica Reyes is made of.

  
Electrons can be particles or waves. She learned that in physics class. Erica is a whisper or a murmur right up until the moment when she slams into existence with an intention Allison hasn’t been able to muster yet.

  
“Guess you’re dead, too,” she says, tossing her hair behind her shoulder, a quirk she didn’t have in life. “Welcome to the club.”

  
* * *

  
Kate died angry.

  
Her mother died with dignity.

  
Gerard didn’t die at all.

  
Boyd died and refused to apologize for it.

  
Erica died strong. She didn’t die for anything.

  
(Neither did Allison, in the end, but that doesn't matter anymore. Dead is dead.)

  
* * *

  
“What’s that pack of yours worth, huh? What’s it worth if they can’t even keep you from ending up here.”

Erica’s still angry. Allison thinks that makes sense. She has an awful lot to be angry about.

  
“Scott’s a good Alpha,” she argues. “They’re going to be a strong pack.” She’s not sure of much, but she’s sure of that.

  
“Didn’t do us much good, did it?” Erica demands.

  
“He’s not Derek.”

  
“He’s not werewolf Jesus, either,” Erica says.

  
“No, he’s not. He’s seventeen.”

  
Erica doesn't know where they are, but she already knew that Boyd died, which was a relief. They bumped into each other a while back before Erica learned how to reach out and grab.

  
The best thing about Boyd was that he never sought out Allison's apology before she was ready to give one. Erica doesn’t demand one either, but Allison thinks it’s more out of distraction than anything else. She thinks Erica must be angry at too much to waste energy on the one person’s she’s managed to cling to in the smoke.

  
Allison can work with that.

  
“Scott’s still learning,” she insists. “They all are.”

  
(She is so, so grateful they get the chance to.)

  
* * *

  
This place they are is like the tide. They are rolling and fading and pulsing, pushed around to their breaking point, and all they have to cling to is each other.

  
Erica talks a lot. Allison mostly listens.

  
There’s not a lot they have to offer one another. Allison knows that soon it will be time to let go.

  
* * *

  
“I’m not your guide,” Erica says.

  
“What?”

  
Erica still breathes in and out shakily, as if she still needs breath to keep her heart beating and her eyes sharp. Allison only does that when she feels like she floating, when she can’t remember what it's like to be touched by flesh.

  
“I'm not your guide to some afterlife . Besides, I 'd rather be reincarnated,” Erica says. “My mom was Catholic, but I never really paid much attention. I always liked the idea of reincarnation.”

  
“Maybe we’ve reached enlightenment already. Maybe that's where we're going.” She remembers the day they learned about Hinduism in History class. Stiles and Scott were in the middle of an epic game of tic-tac-toe, one with seven columns and seven rows and very little chance of a producing a winner.

  
“What? You and your crossbow and me and my claws? If that’s enlightenment, then my moral center needs a crapload of recalibrating.”

  
Erica breathes again, in and out.

  
“Anyway, I’m not your guide. I'm just sating that if you’re waiting for me to help you cross over, you’re going to be waiting an awfully long time.”

  
Allison thinks about nothing in particular for a long moment, then nods and tries not to cry.

  
“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

  
Time is irrelevant and maybe nonexistent, but it quivers in this moment. Allison is ready. She knows this feeling, as innate as the flush and shake of death and the rise and fall of a chest breathing in life. She is terrified, and Erica is, too.

  
They both move at once, and Erica’s hair is in her face, and this is the realest she’s felt since she died, fear coursing through her veins and grief choking her throat, because god, this is awful. She wants to be hugging her dad or Scott or even Stiles, anyone but this girl who she shot arrows into, who spits venom back in her face.

  
Erica probably doesn’t want to be hugging her, either.

  
But at the end of it all, they are two dead teenagers, and when you’re a dead teenager, you take your hugs where you can get them. Blame isn’t much use. It won’t get you a driver’s license, or a prom dress, or even one last gasping breath of air.

  
Erica is gone again, a whisper or a murmur. She won't cross over until she knows that Boyd has, too.

  
Allison can respect that.

  
* * *

  
Back in New York, that long, hot summer years ago, she got lost within the crowds. She panicked. She forgot almost everything her dad told her, wandering down streets and forgetting her bracelet and finally approaching a group of teenagers with snot and tears running down her face. Luckily, they were nice, and one was observant enough to notice the dog tags and call her frantic parents.

  
That afternoon, Mom and Dad walked her back to the apartment, in cheerful moods that can only come from relief. They each took one of her hands and swung her through the air as she jumped. There was never a doubt in her mind that they would guide her back to her feet.

  
At the top of every swing, for just an instant, it felt like she was flying.

  
* * *

  
The first time she died, she died with friends, and the nemeton let them live again. Most people don’t have that chance.

  
Most people don’t die when they’re seventeen.

  
She decides there is no such thing as fate and that there is no way that this was always destined to be her death. Her story of her life does not begin or end with a silver arrow.

  
There is no such thing as fate, but there is such a thing as werewolves, just like there are banshees and kanimas and darachs and a million other things she will never live to see.

  
She thinks of Stiles and Isaac and Lydia and Scott, and something deep within knows they are alive, that they will live and remember her, and she smiles when she thinks of the lives they get to live.

  
This is _not_ her fate, but it _is_ what happened, and for what it's worth, she didn't lie to her dad. She _is_ proud. She's prouder than she ever thought possible.

 

* * *

  
(Her door opens.)

  
(Somewhere among the living, an alpha howls, and in that howl there is a message for her pack.)

  
(She will never be a shadow again.)

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is at least a little inspired by one of my other incomplete works, All the Broken Children, which never quite felt right. This is what happened instead.


End file.
